Ritchie Torres: Biden’s news conference won’t offer ‘political salvation’

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) does not believe President Biden’s press conference after the NATO summit will be “political salvation” for his reelection campaign. 

“Neither the press conference tonight nor the NBC interview on Monday evening will offer the President the political salvation he seems to be seeking,” Torres said in a post to the social platform X on Thursday.

Biden is scheduled to speak at a press conference Thursday following the NATO summit. It will mark his first solo press conference since the June 27 debate.

Torres has gone from criticizing other Democrats on Monday for the “drip, drip, drip of public statements of no confidence” to saying Wednesday that the party needed to have a “serious reckoning” about who the nominee will be. 

“The narrative that the President simply had one bad debate performance reflects a continuing pattern of denial and self-delusion,” Torres later remarked in the Thursday social media post. He also called the performance “evidence of a deeper challenge.”

Torres’s latest remarks come as Biden faces increasing pressure from party leaders to step down as the Democratic nominee for president following his debate performance two weeks ago. Biden stumbled over his words and his voice sounded raspy during the televised appearance, which prompted growing concerns about Biden’s ability to win the election.

Aside from the Thursday press conference, the campaign announced Wednesday that Biden will sit down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday. 

Torres does not believe the interview or press conference will be enough. 

“I will respectfully listen to the President’s press conference tonight and the interview on Monday evening but the ability to survive a single public appearance is the bare minimum of what should be expected of a Democratic Nominee,” he wrote. 

Biden has maintained he will remain in the race, but a growing number of Democratic congressional lawmakers have continued to call for the president to step aside.

Ten Congressional Democrats, nine in the House and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), have now called on the president to stand down. George Clooney also penned a column Wednesday calling on Biden to stand down. Clooney had co-hosted the Democratic party’s largest fundraiser in the party’s history two weeks before the debate. 

While Torres did not explicitly call for Biden to step down in the Thursday post, he said that if Biden stays on as nominee, then the Democratic Party will “have no choice but to make the best of a complicated situation,” adding that “there is no point in denying the complications.”